Personal Finance Software

[Wabash02]

I'm looking to finally get all my finances organized and looking for recommendations.  Quicken seems like the main option, do people generally use that or does anyone have other recommendations?  I am NOT looking for investment advice from this product and I am willing to pay (I've used the free ones in the past and cannot stand the upselling calls and emails).

 

My main goals are to:

Track income vs spending broadly

Created savings buckets for various goals

Get a simple view of my balance sheet

Bonus for handling bills, etc in one place.

 

We mostly use USAA, Amex, Fifth Third, and Interactive Brokers for our accounts, if that helps. Any recommendations?

 

Thanks!

[Jurgis]

I use Quicken and have used it since 1990s.

 

I have not had any significant blowups with it, though looking at reviews some people do.

 

I track income, investing, 401(k), IRAs, ESPP, RSUs, credit cards, bank accounts, mortgage, etc.

I don't do budgeting.

I mostly don't use Quicken info for my taxes (I use Turbo Tax Online which is not connected to Quicken on my PC.)

 

Quicken mostly works, but has quirks and issues (some that are never fixed for 10 years or so).

I can do things like IRRs for a selection of accounts for any time frame, etc. Graphs and reports are mostly good IMO.

 

I don't particularly like paying extortion subscription every year or two years. IMO Quicken does not provide enough incremental value for them to charge the subscription. Unfortunately, there are pretty much no viable alternatives (IMO) and so I'm stuck.

(I have relatives who still use Quicken 2003 or 2007 and it works just fine - but you cannot get electronic updates and have to put all bills/charges/etc into it by hand.)

 

Let me know if you have any questions and I'll try to answer.

 

Good luck.

[LounginMKL]

You can also use Mint, which is basically an online version of Quicken. It's free (in a FB kind of way) and pulls balance data from your financial institutions (banks, brokerage, lenders,etc...).

[Jurgis]

BTW, even with the help of Quicken, entering RSUs, ESPPs correctly is a pain. I sometimes just eyeball it. But then I don't use Quicken for my taxes. If I did, I'm not sure the RSU/ESPP info in it would be correct. More sure about ESPP, less sure about RSUs.

[maplevalue]

Has anyone tried Sharesight for investment performance? Looking for an investment performance tracker which lets one calculate IRRs easily across multiple accounts and not sure if Quicken (~$100/year) is enough, or I should strech for Sharesight (~300/year).

[Jurgis]

Quicken is likely enough.

Haven't used Sharesight.

 

Not sure how easy it will be to ingest your data into Quicken or Sharesight - depends on what accounts you have and what else you want to get in.

 

Quicken IRRs may be broken in certain corner cases. They have been in the past. I think they fixed most of the issues, not sure if all of them. I don't care about exact IRRs anymore to bother digging deep. No clue about Sharesight IRRs.

[maplevalue]

Quicken is likely enough.

Haven't used Sharesight.

 

Not sure how easy it will be to ingest your data into Quicken or Sharesight - depends on what accounts you have and what else you want to get in.

 

Quicken IRRs may be broken in certain corner cases. They have been in the past. I think they fixed most of the issues, not sure if all of them. I don't care about exact IRRs anymore to bother digging deep. No clue about Sharesight IRRs.

 

Thanks for your input. Thankfully my portfolio is not super active (although likely to become more so in the years ahead), so I expect manual entry for most transactions will suffice, and yeah similar to you just need a 'good enough' IRR which Quicken seems to be able to provide.

[moneymouse]

After many years of using Quicken, I concluded it just wasn’t that useful. If I wanted to know how much I spent on electricity 2 years ago, it was great...but as far as budgeting and planning allocation of income, relatively worthless.  We’ve been using YNAB for about 8 years and it has made a tremendous impact on our savings and financial planning. It is now subscription based (we’re still running fine on the pre-subscription software) but it is a FANTASTIC financial planning tool.

[thepupil]

i use personal capital, which is great for tracking expenses. 

 

I found it to be much better and require far fewer corrections than mint, though it's been 8 or 9 years since I used mint.

 

Personal Capital does not connect with interactive brokers. I just manually update the account balances (for net worth tracking). Because my paychecks go directly into my Interactive Brokers account, Personal Capital is not good for tracking income if you have direct deposit with IBKR.

 

i don't use it to pay bills, and don't think it has that ability.

[CorpRaider]

I use mint.  It does double count and misclassify stuff a lot. I go back in like every 6 months and "clean" the data.  Intuit sold quicken and put its resources behind mint (fyi if you like their stuff).

 

I tried personal capital but it was getting my investment performance all wrong and having trouble tracking a lot of my investments (which is like their whole deal), so I quit it.

 

I also tried YNAB for a minute, the version after they came out with the app.  I didn't like it.  Don't remember why.

 

I've noticed a lot of banks and brokers are starting/trying to roll out this type of service for clients.  Seems like it would be good for churn. 

 

Google pay is building out the spending tracking functionality too it seems based on a beta version of the app I got.  Seems like they could so something neat. 

[GrahamKlarman]

I use mint.  It does double count and misclassify stuff a lot. I go back in like every 6 months and "clean" the data.  Intuit sold quicken and put its resources behind mint (fyi if you like their stuff).

 

I tried personal capital but it was getting my investment performance all wrong and having trouble tracking a lot of my investments (which is like their whole deal), so I quit it.

 

I also tried YNAB for a minute, the version after they came out with the app.  I didn't like it.  Don't remember why.

 

I've noticed a lot of banks and brokers are starting/trying to roll out this type of service for clients.  Seems like it would be good for churn. 

 

Google pay is building out the spending tracking functionality too it seems based on a beta version of the app I got.  Seems like they could so something neat.

 

I like mint too!

[maplevalue]

Quicken is likely enough.

Haven't used Sharesight.

 

Not sure how easy it will be to ingest your data into Quicken or Sharesight - depends on what accounts you have and what else you want to get in.

 

Quicken IRRs may be broken in certain corner cases. They have been in the past. I think they fixed most of the issues, not sure if all of them. I don't care about exact IRRs anymore to bother digging deep. No clue about Sharesight IRRs.

 

Thanks for your input. Thankfully my portfolio is not super active (although likely to become more so in the years ahead), so I expect manual entry for most transactions will suffice, and yeah similar to you just need a 'good enough' IRR which Quicken seems to be able to provide.

 

So I ended up going with Quicken. A minor annoyance is that I had to backfill monthly data on some CAD mutual funds and CAD preferred shares that I own. Other than that I am pretty impressed with it. Was able to download my IB account in Quicken format and then manually add my other accounts' transactions (a bit of an annoying step, but only have to do it once). Very nice to be able to run reports and get IRRs for the whole portfolio or by account. A big upgrade from having previously just kept a spreadsheet of my holdings, and for anyone with an account that is not very active I would recommend it.